Thought Picnic: My simple story is one of life

My story for a book?

I have heard it many times that I have a story to tell, it might be interesting enough to be engaging or people might be bored with disinterest.

It is a story that has appeared in short ruminations of a blog, many written over time that I am unsure I can make a book out of the lot, but some people still think it is a story worth telling in some way, I might need some help.

My story, my conundrum

Yesterday, I found myself telling not just parts of the story but quite a good bit of the whole story, the many parts that I will freely share in discussion but wonder about the effect it might have on others whose influences either directly or indirectly in my life will probably leave them in shock rather than surprise.

Even the ones closest to me and those who think they know me well will suddenly realise that even for themselves their life stories are like prisms put up to the light and depending on where observers stand the observers see just a perspective, never everything.

That goes for my parents, my siblings, my long known friends, my new friends, my many acquaintances, colleagues in other walks of life, interactions on social media and anyone else.

My story is my lesson

I am both a simple person and a complex personality with everything you can find in the broadest spectrum of that scale, but in telling my story yesterday, I learnt something more about myself.

Despite what I have been through, I am too fiercely independent that the help I sometimes would get by default is rarely offered. I then find that I suffer great privation for long periods of time until the realisation dawns on me that I could do with some help.

Having been diagnosed with cancer, gone through treatment and survived with the amazing help of friends around me, the affinity towards my once nuclear family is looser and the need to that much desired companionship they have wished for me is so less convincing – when you come through that alone, you cannot be persuaded that an alternative could be so significantly better.

My story of life and death

And finally, whilst I was fighting for life, I was surrounded by death, a sentence delivered in a result over a decade ago and as I was recovering, the loss of two dear friends I would have loved to share the life of survival with, they were not so lucky and I am so saddened by that.

In the end, what happened to me was not merely a story, but life, life happened as experience, as disaster, as loss, as recovery and still recovering, but most of all, I have found that the story is one short mantra – Whilst I am still living, I will live the life I have, to the full and as happily as I can – I will not burden myself with things that will sap my zest for life.